American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said the US government has been wilfully arming Takfiri militants operating in Syria.

The pulitzer-prize-winner journalist said the administration of President Barack Obama, in particular the CIA, has knowingly armed militants in Syria, including the ISIL terrorists, UPI reported on Monday.

“Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office — and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him — has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff,” Hersh wrote in an article recently published on the London Review of Books.

“Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that (ISIL) must be stopped.”

Hersh continued that a highly classified 2013 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)/Joint Chiefs of Staff report on Syria forecast that the fall of the Assad government would lead to “chaos” and possibly to extremists taking over Syria.

Hersh reported that Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, had told him that his agency sent a “constant stream” of warnings to the “civilian leadership” about the dire consequences of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The DIA’s reporting “got enormous pushback” from the Obama administration, Hersh quoted Flynn as saying. “I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.”

The report, published in the January 7, 2016 edition of the London Review of Books, relied heavily on an anonymous former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hersh wrote that the adviser told him the DIA/Joint Chiefs report took a “dim view” of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups and found that the covert US program to arm and support those “moderate” rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, which then morphed the program into an “across-the-board technical, arms and logistical program for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIL.”

“The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists,” Hersh wrote.

The White House has not responded directly to the allegations raised in the article in the London Review of Books.

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